So my computer crashed...

[Protec]

I was on my computer and it froze and the sound “froze” too. The PC rebooted and gets stuck at the start up screen. There was no blue screen so haven’t really got any idea what is the cause straight away. I’ll get to troubleshooting!

[Protec]

Well, it's sorted out now. After running the "Pre boot System Assessment" it found that drive 2 had issues. The computer has 2 Hard drives and 1 SSD and the 2 hard drives have bad sectors anyway so I'm not surprised it found errors. However, I don't think that was the reason the computer crashed since those drives only have pictures, etc on them so I don't think they would have brought the entire computer down. I have have drives fail in the past and they never did that. So, I'm convinced that the issue must have been on the C Drive with (SSD) and something had caused the computer to crash. On the D drive I had made an image of the PC for a restore point so the SSD was formatted and the image installed onto it. The 2 Hard Drives were untouched. I have only lost a small amount of data that wasn't backed up but the majority of my data is on the 2 hard drives and on another computer that is attached to the network.

[Protec]

Still seems a bit unstable and after a restart it did the same thing. I have a spare SSD so if the problem continues, I'll try the other SSD.

[Rob_D]

Check the event log for any signs of trouble.

 

To be honest, I'd be looking beyond the drives. It sounds like a possible graphics/driver issue to me, but realistically it could be anything up to and including CPU/RAM. Or as simple as a corrupted driver or DLL. Look for any commonalities in what you were doing when it went down.

 

Years ago my PC would crash every time it tried to load video thumbnails in file explorer, which wound up being due to a dodgy xvid codec.

[Protec]

Thanks for the reply. The first time it happened, I was watching a Youtube video and the computer just froze and restarted but when it got to the windows logo on the black screen at boot, it just froze and the loading icon froze too. I forced the computer off and it would just freeze every time it got to the logo. My computer had never done anything like that before. In the end I formatted the SSD C Drive and restored the computer to an image I created back in 2018. It seems to be running fine now however it might not work for much longer.